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The Dreamlands
The home of the Five Queens, a land of infinite adventure and wonder that, for every Princess, lies just beyond the wall of sleep ... and that had, once, entrapped the Hopeful in webs of illusion, drawing them away from the real world's pain. History The Making The monstrous armies that conquered the Light's Kingdom in the age before history were led (or so modern Princesses assume) by subtle and devious generals who wished to secure the Darkness' victory for all time. They found a way to prevent the return of Princesses, the Light's most capable servants, by constructing a trap for their souls, deep within the mind and soul of the world. The trap was a mirror, reflecting the Light shining on the world; it drew to itself the souls of the Princesses who died in the Kingdom's fall, and enfolded them within an imaginary world where they could dream of fighting Darkness and defeating it, without disputing its sway over its new conquest. And the trap worked, possibly beyond its makers' expectations: not only were the Princesses of the Kingdom's day drawn into the dream and held, but so was everyone whom the Light touched and empowered in all the long ages since. And as the millenia passed, the illusion grew and ramified, reflecting the thoughts and dreams of every human alive, but shaped by memories of the captives into a new Kingdom, governed as the fallen Kingdom was by a council of Queens, and surrounded by a wilderness where monsters bred and made war. The Release And then, everyone within that imaginary land was struck by revelation: they knew, quite abruptly, that they were dreaming, and life in a truer reality lay open to them. Many of them took the opportunity immediately, returning to the bodies of infants just conceived; and these were born, and grew, and flourished, and before long they Blossomed, becoming the first Princesses of the modern age. And as they Blossomed, the new Princesses discovered that the lands of dream they had left to become human again still existed; for gates to those lands stood open to them whenever they slept, and the souls they left behind welcomed their visits, begging for news of the waking world. Many more souls have followed those first pioneers; new Princesses are born and Blossom every year. Naturally, the Hopeful wondered what it was that revealed the Dreamlands' true nature to its inhabitants. Over the decades since the Release, speculations have been floated, arguments proposed and refuted. It's now generally believed that the key event was the first landing on the Moon in July of 1969. The Queen of Diamonds argues that the Dreamlands are in some metaphysical way linked to the Moon, that their property of reflecting a more fundamental reality is tied to the Moon's appearance of shedding light that in fact is reflected from the Sun. And so, in her opinion, when a human foot trod the lunar surface, by proving the Moon to be not luminous in itself, it also proved the Dreamlands to be not real in themselves ... Entering the Dreamlands Even now, after the Release, the Dreamlands call out to the Hopeful as they sleep, and any Princess may find a passage to them without conscious effort. Moreover, the call grows more seductive, and easier to follow, when a Princess' encounters with the waking world's cruelty weigh on her soul. Princesses who have not yet visited the Dreamlands make an extended roll of Inner Light + Empathy + Shadows, rolling once a day when they go to sleep. Each time a Princess changes her sleeping place, she loses all successes earned on previous rolls and starts over. On the night a Princess accumulates eight successes on this roll, she comes (apparently by chance) across an entrance to her Crawlspace. Just how this happens varies - one Princess notices an odd-looking animal, and follows it to a burrow; another gets up in the middle of the night for a glass of water, and notices a door that wasn't there before. The entrance is, however, always difficult to get through in some way; usually, it's too small to walk through standing up, forcing the Princess to crawl. The Princess is under no compulsion to enter the Crawlspace, but she feels, instinctively, both that it's quite safe, and that what lies beyond is something wonderful. (With the Storyteller's agreement, a player may declare that her character has had this happen to her already, or the Storyteller may play it out in the prelude.) A Princess who has visited the Dreamlands, even once, can deliberately search for a passage anywhere. This calls for an extended Inner Light + Empathy + Shadows roll, as with accidental discovery, but the Princess now rolls once every five minutes. : Dramatic Failure: The Princess cannot find an entrance in this location, or anywhere else before she's had a full night's rest. Failure: The Princess makes no progress. Success: The Princess progresses. Once she accumulates 8 successes, she finds an entrance. Exceptional Success: The Princess makes great progress. Modifiers: The Princess is sleepy (+1), the Princess is wide awake (-1), hot chocolate or warm milk (+1), old building with mysterious corners (+1), other people are present (-1 per witness) Once found, a Crawlspace entrance continues to exist as long as the Princess remembers it, and vanishes if she forgets it. (One Princess had a doorway in the depths of her bedroom closet, which faded while she went to university. A few days after coming home, when she needed to visit the Dreamlands, she remembered the old door and there it was.) Finding a known entrance is not quite automatic, but only a simple Inner Light + Empathy + Shadows roll is required, with modifiers as above. A dramatic failure on this roll means the Princess has forgotten the entrance and must search for it again. Crawlspace entrances are not truly physical passages, though they appear as such; they are in fact mnemonic devices. Thus one Princess cannot use another's entrance - in fact, she can't even see the other's entrance. It's possible, though, for one Princess to help another find an entrance she knows of. This works as a form of teamwork; the Princess who knows of the entrance makes her simple roll to find it, then adds her successes as dice to the other's extended roll to search. Princesses who have not visited the Dreamlands may search for an entrance if they are being guided in this way, and senior Princesses very often guide the newly Blossomed into the Dreamlands to acquaint them with ther inheritance and their peers. Entering the Crawlspace requires spending a Wisp. Exactly how a Crawlspace opens varies with the shape of the entrance. It could be as simple as turning a button handled key to unlock a small door, but spending the Wisp might instead make the Princess dexterous enough to squeeze through a rabbit hole, turn her insubstantial so she can slip between the join where two of her bedroom walls meet or shrink down until she's small enough to climb down the gap between her mattress and the tailboard of her bed. One detail is constant: the Princess appears, to herself, to assume her transformed regalia soon after entering Crawlspace. Onlookers, on the other hand, see the Princess drop off to sleep at this point, or walk off in a reverie to bed. Inside the entrance, Crawlspace is narrow and claustrophobic, governed according to dream logic by both the Princesses subconscious and the form of the entrance. The Princess who climbs down the bottom of her own bed could spend the entire crawlspace climbing down the folds of her bedsheets cramped between the mattress and the tailboard or she could quickly find herself climbing down actual cliffs with freezing winds and catastrophic mists but she probably will find herself climbing. Whatever form the Crawlspace takes, it is filled with memories from both the current and past lives. A Princess climbing down freezing cliffs might catch sight of cave after cave; one crawling through mud and crumbling brickwork at the bottom of a well could find peep-holes formed by cracks in the masonry. (These memories, and the uncomfortable conditions, are essentially an attempt by the Princesses' subconscious to keep her out of the Dreamlands' trap, despite the Dreamlands no longer functioning as a prison.) Many Princesses enter the Crawlspace looking for a useful memory rather than trying to reach the Dreamlands. This requires an extended Inner Light + Intelligence + Empathy roll. : Dramatic Failure: The Princess finds a false memory, or stumbles upon a nightmarish memory; the Storyteller may call for a Sensitivity check. Failure: The Princess makes no progress to finding the memory. Success: The Princess makes progress to finding a useful memory. If she simply doesn't have a useful memory to find she discovers this. Exceptional Success: When the Princess accumulates enough successes she will find a memory that goes above and beyond her requirements. Suggested Modifiers: Eidetic Memory (+2), strong emotions attached to the memory (+1), dull memory such as hours spent in a library searching for an enemy's weaknesses (-1), the Princess has some suitable prop for navigating her Crawlspace such as a torch for a dark cave, climbing gear or warm clothes for freeing cliffs (+1, regardless of the usual equipment bonus). Normally, a Princess in Crawlspace simply presses on to the Dreamlands, or turns back and awakens. She can do either of these without a roll - even the weakest, least athletic Princess will have little trouble getting through the harshest Crawlspace so long as she makes the attempt. A Princess who follows the Dreamlands' lure along the easiest path always emerges somewhere directly beneath the Wall, the Dreamlands' outer boundary. From that point (and only that point) the Princess can return and awaken at will. Each Crawlspace entrance always leads to the same place along the Wall; however, no Princess has ever found a relation between the waking location of an entrance and the place in the Dreamlands it leads to. The Wall is a mystery. As far as can be discerned, the Wall surrounds the Dreamlands entirely, not letting anything in or out (apart from Princesses passing through the Crawlspace). It is widely believed to be the defence that keeps the Darkness from washing over the Dreamlands, restricting it to small dribbles which can be contained and removed, rather than, like a vast tsunami, crushing everything in its path. Some, however, argue that the Wall is a prison, designed to trap and contain the Dreamlands, keeping them separate from the world, and so the Princesses should work to destroy it to free the Dreamlands into the minds of everyone. It appears differently to every traveller. While a city-dweller might see a vast front of steel and concrete, a Princess from a remote desert-dwelling tribe will see a wall of sandstone, smoothed by countless winds, with no climbing holds. Strange writing, no matter the appearance, though, always decorates the Wall. None of it is ever in the Royal Speech, but other languages have been seen, the style of writing always archaic with seemingly pointless flicks and curls. Sometimes, strange mists pour out of the wall, cascading down its front; if a Princess breaths those in, the writings throughout the Dreamlands appear normal, and she can make sense of even the strange runes, but the understanding comes at a cost; her next roll to escape degeneration is at -1, as the mist saps at her self-resolve. Topography The Dreamlands are an exceedingly varied place. Sometimes you can stumble across one man's neuroses writ large across the landscape (while most other humans never even feature), while in other places you can walk along a stairway made of light, up into the heavens to walk along the surface of a Mars covered in unknown ruins inscribed in runes which do not resemble the Royal Tongue. You may stumble across a town which appears almost like the real world, save that none of the brands match, and the streets are filled with a parade of strange, eternally dancing figures of bronze. One nakama found a cursed area, almost overshadowed by the Darkness, where the sharp-fanged folk ritually consumed their victims. Only one made it out alive, the monsters dragging the others to their altars and eating them in a way that killed them in the real world, hunks of flesh torn out of their sleeping bodies, in the name of the Red Word. The wild districts where these things can be found are all, however, some days' travel from the Wall -- the Dreamlands' cartographers say that one moves inward to find them, and outward to reach the Wall. The most confusing thing about navigating the Dreamlands is that "inward" and "outward" have no simple relationship with the ordinary three dimensions of space ... and there are any number of districts that lie further inwards of other districts, but at the same north/south and east/west position. Very often the traveler finds that one pass through a ridge of low hills leads to a pleasant valley, while another pass a mile to the east opens on a wide plain cut by a great river, which runs just where the valley ought to be, and isn't. Dreamlanders say their home is folded on itself; north/south, east/west and up/down they call the traveling directions, and in/out is a folding direction. There is a second folding direction, called deosil/widdershins, along which one travels by following the course of the Wall -- deosil keeps the Wall on one's left, widdershins keeps it on the right -- and arranging the Dreamlands' counties by their folding positions, ignoring their traveling positions, shows that the Dreamlands lie within a roughly circular area with the Wall at its rim, and a trip straight across the circle (if that were possible) would take seven days' or so walking. In the traveling directions, the Dreamlands are far more extensive. The central districts have a temperate and pleasant climate, much like California or the Mediterranean basin. From those districts one can go at least a thousand miles without finding any boundary, though the conditions grow increasingly hostile. Northward, the climate cools, until snow and ice lie unmelted throughout the year in the farthest districts. Southward is tropical heat, with empty deserts and thick jungles at the limits of exploration. To the east rise great mountains thick with forests, which grow into dense impenetrable thickets; and to the west the land breaks into a fringe of islands and seas, which eventually merge into an infinite ocean. The distance inward from the Wall has an importance in the Dreamlands beyond the way it allows districts to overlie each other. The mysterious, reality-bending Gales that blow through them rise and fall constantly, but how swiftly they change depends on how far the Wall is. Next to the Wall itself, the Gales hardly vary at all, and the districts there remain stable, though not very interesting. Going inward, the districts have Gales that are normally calm, but gust occasionally and strongly, leaving behind subtly altered landscapes. Quite often, the changes reflect places on Earth, or the popular ideas of such places, or (more strangely) places found only in novels and movies. A further oddity of these reflections is that, while they frequently contain things with writing on them, the writing never looks like the text that would appear in the reflected place. In minor cases, Princesses might find a discarded fast-food box, but the script on it is flowing and cursive, elaborately decorated in gold leaf. In more extreme cases, everything is written backwards, or there are never any vowels, or the scripts are from another part of the world entirely. In the most central, farthest inward lands, the Gales blow wildly, falling still for a moment only to burst anew with immense force. It is here that the traveler may find herself walking through a man's nightmare, magnified to a country of dread. It is here, also, that she may find a space grown strangely thin and tenuous, where objects can sometimes vanish while her back is turned; or a place jumbled with curios and wonders brought together, though by no obvious means, from every corner of the world. There are tales of monstrous or alien things to be found in the far inward districts: a redoubt of Alhambra in a district haunted by Darkness; a waste of ash and cinders where Goalenu mold porcelain figurines that hunt with burning green eyes; a snow-capped peak, topped by a fortress made of clockwork ticking away in a slow rotation, from which gray-robed figures gaze through telescopes at the Dreamlands' stars. The Queens' Seats The five Queens hold their courts within the Dreamlands in districts a fair distance inward, though not in the most volatile lands. Princesses can reach their seats easily enough, but gaining audience with one is always a difficult trial. Swords: The Fortress Gleaming in gold and marble, the Fortress rises above a town of barracks, gymnasia and arenas. The armies of the Dreaming Kingdom come here to rest and train, and those wishing to fight in its service come here to learn the profession. Excellence in war earns great praise, excellence in other arts earns little less; but the things most prized here are dedication and ardor. They say here, "excellence is the flower of devotion." The Queen of Swords holds regular tournaments in which one may prove one's prowess and dedication, and grants audience only to the victorious. Clubs: The Preserve A wilderness dotted with lodges and cabins, and filled with beasts, streams thick with fish, and wild fruit trees, the Preserve has few human residents. The climate is changeable; violent storms sweep over the land at random times, and yield to bright, hot days and chilly clear nights. The Queen of Clubs moves constantly from one lodge to another, hunting game for food, and those wishing to speak to her must track her down, living off the land as she does and braving the weather. Spades: The Bazaar Within a natural harbor at the mouth of a wide river, the Bazaar is the largest emporium of trade in the Dreamlands. Warehouses full of wondrous goods are surrounded by shops selling all manner of services, and the streets are crowded with cheerful, colorful bargainers. Periodically the Bazaar holds carnival, and the Queen of Spades loses herself among the crowds, leaving hints of her intentions for the cleverest to find; those who find her then gain her favor. Hearts: The Memorial A somewhat subdued district holds a building much like a Gothic cathedral set amidst memorials of past ages. The people here are serious, custodians of ancient customs, and always prepared both to teach the willing student, and to learn from the respectful scholar. Unlike the Fortress's people, who prize excellence as proof of devotion, the Memorial's residents value the finished work of excellence for itself, particularly when it follows a traditional model. One who has such a work may enter the central cathedral, where the Queen of Hearts welcomes them. Diamonds: The Academy A tower of glass and steel pierces an island of stone cliffs. The Academy, unusually for the Dreamlands, has all the comforts of modern technology, and even some items that don't yet exist on Earth outside an inventor's fancy. The people here are inquisitive to a fault, and debate arcane matters of philosophy for sport; one enters the argument at one's peril, for the debaters will seize on the least flaw in your reasoning, and pursue an implication to the end. The Queen of Diamonds presides over the colloquium, and takes note of those with the best arguments and evidence. Risks A Princess entering the Dreamlands leaves her physical body behind her, and projects her mind and soul into a body formed from the Dreamlands' substance. If she is injured there, she does not take damage on her Health track -- her physical Health simply isn't relevant. Instead, if she doesn't spend Wisps to block the blow, she loses points of Willpower: each level of damage of any type (bashing, lethal and aggravated alike) translates to one lost Willpower point. Princesses who run out of Willpower for any reason immediately awake from their meditation; they cannot reenter the Dreamlands until they have had a full night's sleep, and the Wall will open for them wherever it did on her last entry. The relationship between time in the Dreamlands and time in waking life is strangely variable; it seems to depend much more on the density of one's experience than on any objective clock. So, for instance, an exciting fight can consume half an hour's meditation, but appear to last only five minutes or so; but a long journey through safe districts might compress a full day's experience into only an hour of dreaming time. (As a rule of thumb, an event in the Dreamlands takes as much time in the waking world as it would take the players to roll the dice and figure out what happened, while the time it takes in the Dreamlands is what it would require in real life.) There are even cases of Princesses parting in the Dreamlands, and finding on their next meeting that one has experienced a few hours packed with incident, while the other has been traveling for days ... The Dreamlands are a place for glory and the Light, not for the complexities, subtleties and mundanities of the waking world. It is possible to resume one's mundane form while there, and there is even a benefit to doing so, for in the Dreamlands, the burden of the past and all the hopes heaped on the Regalia clouds the Princess' soul, imposing a -1 to all her Wits rolls while she is transformed. But there is also a risk. For every 24 hours in the Dreamlands (by the Dreamlands' clock) that a Princess goes without her Regalia, she must roll Resolve + Composure, at a -1 penalty for each previous failure on such rolls. :Dramatic Failure: The very essence of the Dreamlands envelops the Princess' soul, filling it up with hundreds and thousands of dreams. She takes the Dreamlands into herself, even as she loses herself to it. She loses a dot of Willpower permanently. Moreover, the Dreamlands leave their mark on her waking body as well, both her transformed self and mundane self receive a permanent alteration appropriate to her environment. In a place where trickster fox spirits live, she might grow more like them, her ears permanently morphing. In a place where the Darkness is winning, the changes are less... benign. Nevertheless, paradoxically it feels good, as the dreams of humanity flood into her, filling her with the hope and expectations. The Princess gains a point of Belief, and may come back again to bask in the glory of the Dreamlands. :Failure: The Princess gets a glimpse, just a brief sight, of the Dreamlands as a whole. The sight is beautiful, but also terrifying in its own way. The character loses a Willpower point, and also gains a physical alteration. Unlike a Dramatic Failure, these are gone when she leaves the Dreamlands. She may change gender temporarily, or find that her eyes are suddenly a vibrant shade of purple. The experience is refreshing in its own way; she gets +1 to her next Belief check. :Success: The Princess remains as they were. :Exceptional Success: The Princess manages to bask in the essence of the Dreamlands without losing herself. She may roll her Inner Light, and gains 1 Wisp for each success. Maintaining one's Regalia in the Dreamlands is a good deal easier than it is in waking life. A Princess rolls to remain transformed only once every 24 hours, by the Dreamlands' clock. A dramatic failure on that roll, however, has a more serious consequence; even after the Princess recovers her phylactery, she cannot transform within the Dreamlands for 24 hours after her failure. Inhabitants There are at least three different types of beings native to the Dreamlands. They were named by a theatrically minded Princess as the chorus, the actors, and the stars. The chorus, from all appearances, are less independent people, than moving parts of the places where they're found; they walk, and talk, and do what you would naturally expect people to do in the situation you find them in, and nothing else. Actors, in contrast, are fully realized people, with minds, memories, desires and aspirations. They differ from the stars (and the Princesses) in only one way: the Release passed them by. Many of them are unaware that a waking world exists, and nearly all who are told of it refuse to credit it. (And for some of the actors who do credit it, it's a pity they were told ...) The stars, finally, are the souls drawn into the Dreamlands who have not chosen to follow the Princesses, or (as with the Five Queens) apparently cannot be reborn. Many of them, and a few actors, can touch the Inner Light, and employ the Charms or stranger powers. Actors and stars are designed much as other characters, with the standard Attributes and Skills. However, their bodies are like the Princesses' projections into the Dreamlands, formed of dream-stuff, and they don't have a Health track. Instead they calculate Willpower by adding together all three Resistance Attributes, and lose points of Willpower when injured as the Princesses do. Powers that normally heal bashing damage don't do anything for them; powers that normally heal lethal or aggravated damage restore Willpower, at a rate of 1 point per level healed, for lethal and aggravated alike. A Dreamlander drained of Willpower is in danger of death; if not treated, they check off 1 of their Willpower dots each minute, and die when the last dot is checked. (Stars, presumably, eventually return to life in some new form, preserved by the Dreamlands' power. Nobody knows what happens to an actor.) Invoking Inhabitants A Princess wishing to make a new Bequest must first find an object in the Dreamlands that has the powers she desires. This is often a difficult task in itself, as objects of power are seldom found in the lands near the Wall; one must go inward to the wilder districts to find them, then carry them back out to the Wall. Next, the Princess must acquire or make an object in the waking world that bears some resemblance to the Dreamlands object -- the closer, the better. Having gained both of these, the Princess meditates while touching the physical object. Once she reaches the Dreamlands, and lays hands on the magical object, she begins an invocation. : Cost: 1 Wisp/roll : Dice Pool: Inner Light : Action: Extended; each roll takes 10 Dreamlands minutes. : The target number of successes equals the new Bequest's cost in Merit dots. On her reaching the target, the magical object vanishes from the Dreamlands and is bound to its physical vessel, becoming a Bequest. If any roll in the extended action is a dramatic failure, the binding fails and the Princess can never make a Bequest from that magical object. An especially appropriate vessel adds bonuses to the ritual rolls, and an inappropriate one adds penalties. Similar rules apply to binding a Shikigami. Here a Princess should find an actor or star who wears the shape of an animal -- there are many such actors, and not a few stars -- and an animal in the waking world of a similar species. One can take a Dreamlands inhabitant in human shape, and one can use a doll or plush toy in the waking world as his vessel, but those never get a bonus for being appropriate. When the Dreamlander has been persuaded to become a Shikigami (his consent and cooperation are required) the Princess begins the invocation, following the same rules as for making a Bequest -- since the Merit costs 4 dots, she must earn 4 successes. A Princess can only bind her own Shikigami. A Shikigami who has left the Dreamlands on his own, finding a vessel without help, can still be bound by this ritual; the only difference is that the trip to the Dreamlands isn't needed. Note for those who have read Astral Realms If one were to ask the Mages (not that one should trust those power hungry meglomaniacs), and permitted them to piggyback on your passage to the Dreamlands (likewise, probably a bad idea; just ask the fae-folk what the Awakened will do for knowledge), they would probably come up with a hypothesis which explained the Dreamlands. According to those Mages who know about it, the Dreamlands are almost certainly a very peculiar hybrid of the parts of the Astral that they call the Tenemos and the Dreamtime. Like the Tenemos, they contain reflections of the dreams of humanity, although unlike the Tenemos, they are far more specific and less far ranging. Like the Dreamtime, they are larger than humanity alone, and necessitate the wearing of Regalia for safety (or, as the Mages foolishly call it, an Amnion). The sorcerer-scholars of the Mysterium have claimed that the Dreamlands hang downwards from a feature of the Dreamtime they call the Omphalos, which is meant to represent the way that humanity separated itself from nature through language. But it does not hang perfectly downwards; parts of its discontinuous surface protrude both up and down; some as high as the Sidereal Wastes and some down into specific Onieroi (such as those of the Princesses). Though, technically, it passes through those realms, it does not interact with them, its surface changing to reflect the places that it passes through. They might even point out that, while the Princesses build their expansive cities which turned in on themselves, the Awakened built their towers to heaven and cast down the gods, and comment on the way that their astral spaces seem to reflect their own history. If this was true, then it might be possible for Mages who sung their way into the Omphalos to find their way into the Dreamlands, at least if they knew about them first ("had sympathy to them"). But no one trusts one of those manipulative sorcerers, right?